The Mariners went down 1-0 to Phoenix yesterday in Sydney. Right before full-time Adelson went down with what appeared to be a serious knee injury.

The 20-year old, who joined the Mariners last year from Western Sydney, was carried off on a stretcher. Adelson ruptured his ACL late in 2015 and missed half of the 2015/2016 A-League season.

Central Coast coach Paul Okon said they won't now how the injury is until the right-side player has scans.

“It’s too early to say until he has a scan to know 100%," Okon told FourFourTwo.

"But he’s just come back from eight or nine  months out and it was great to see him back and playing with a smile on his face. But I guess that's football.

"Hopefully it’s not something that will keep him out for the same amount of time."

Despite the defeat, Okon said the performance against Wellington was a step in the right direction.

“Today was definitely a step in the right direction, we probably didn’t deserve to lose the game but at this stage that’s not our real focus," he said.

"I thought we handled the surface quite well and move ahead to playing the Phoenix next week in New Zealand. The attitude since I’ve arrived has been fine, and we saw that our hunger in the second half to at least try and score a goal was pleasing.

"Obviously we need to improve but no A-League side would be playing at their best level at the moment. For us it's every day, very training session just trying to imrprove, trying to get a better understanding of how we want to play and we look forward to Monday.

"I can't wait to get on the training field on Monday and we'll have a look at the game and see where we can improve. We’ve been working on our combinations – the pitch was a bit bumpy so that last pass was difficult to find but that’s certainly an area we need to improve if we want to score goals.

"We'll just continue working on it. Montgomery and Tavares have been really receptive and we are happy with how they are playing together, with every game and training session they are becoming more comfortable playing with each other.

“We want competition in the squad, that’s going to mean that everyone’s pushing each other to make the first XI.”